Nowadays, everyday life is dominated by the presence of electronic devices in many different forms. For instance, in a domestic setting, such devices play an integral part in home heating (boilers), food storage (refrigerators and freezers) and preparation (microwave ovens, hobs), home entertainment (high fidelity equipment, television, radio, and so on), and many more examples will be apparent. Similarly, in a professional or business environment, electronic devices play a pivotal rule, e.g., computers, servers, cash registers, manufacturing equipment, medical equipment, and so on.
It is therefore of the utmost importance that such electronic devices are reliable, as a device failure can be inconvenient or even dangerous to an end user, and can reduce consumer confidence in the electronic device. Obviously, it is practically impossible to rule out device failure. Nevertheless, in case of a device failure, it is important that the fault causing the failure is correctly diagnosed, e.g., to allow repair of the device or improvement of subsequent designs of the device to reduce the risk of the same fault reoccurring.
For this reason, many electronic devices encounter fault display error codes that allow an end user to establish the cause of the fault, e.g., by consultation of a user manual. Such error codes can also be communicated to a service point to allow off-site diagnosis of the fault, such that repairs of the electronic device can be carried out more efficiently and sometimes even remotely.
A problem is that such error codes are typically lost when the electronic device encounters a loss of power, which is not unusual when developing a fault. In such a scenario, the end user is at a loss as to the cause of the fault, which seriously hampers efficient resolution of the fault.
A similar problem is addressed in U.S. Pat. No. 7,493,525 B2, which discloses a method, system and apparatus for managing data pertaining to the failure of a network device. The data is stored in a non-volatile memory, which retains its data in the event of a power failure, such that the fault can be diagnosed even in the event of a power loss to the network device. However, such fault diagnosis requires a relatively complex retrieval of the diagnostic data from the non-volatile memory, which typically will have to be performed by trained staff. It therefore does not facilitate the end user to establish the cause of the fault, as the end user generally is unable to perform such complex retrieval, not in the least because the end user does not have access to the tools required for such a retrieval process.